Laboratory Simulator of Airborne Video‑Spectral Experiments for Calibration of Earth Remote‑Sensing Instruments

Airborne and spaceborne video-spectral imaging is a key tool for remote sensing of the Earth's surface and atmosphere; however, its accuracy critically depends on rigorous pre-flight calibration and verification of the instrumentation. The aim of this work is to develop and demonstrate a laboratory simulator capable of reproducing reference spectral scenes for the calibration and methodological validation of video-spectral remote sensing systems. The paper presents a laboratory simulator of airborne video spectral measurements of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere «Spectrosynthesizer» intended for testing and calibration of remote sensing instruments. The setup includes a spectral radiance forming subsystem based on an integrating (photometric) sphere with controllable LED and halogen sources, an image forming subsystem with movable test targets, and a registration subsystem. It is shown that the simulator can reproduce a given reference scene radiance spectrum specified either from radiative transfer calculations using the libRadTran model or from spectral library data, while the brightness non uniformity over the exit pupil and the temporal stability of the source meet the requirements for ground calibration of video spectral instruments. Using the BEKAS instrument as an example, the possibility of selecting operating modes under laboratory conditions and subsequently transferring these settings to real flight experiments is demonstrated, which confirms the potential of the proposed simulator for pre flight adjustment and methodological verification of video spectral Earth remote sensing systems.

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